Vaibhav Sooryavanshi switches pitches: 175 in U-19 World Cup final, now class 10 boards

Harare’s high-scoring final feels like yesterday: the thin air, the white ball disappearing into the night sky 15 times over the ropes, the scoreboard frozen at 175 off 80 balls as a 14-year-old lifted India to a record sixth Under-19 World Cup. Barely a fortnight later, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi will walk into Podar International School, Samastipur, find his allotted desk, and turn over the first page of his Class 10 board examinations on 17 February.

Neel Kishore, the school principal, has already framed the moment in cricketing idiom. “This is an academic pitch, not a cricket pitch,” he told ANI after handing the teenager his admit card. “All facilities, safety and security will be the same for all.” The directive is clear: no autograph queues inside the hall, no extra-time allowances, no nets in the corridor. Around 400 students will sit for the boards; one of them simply happens to be the tournament’s second-highest run-getter, owner of a new Under-19 World Cup record of 30 sixes, and the youngest centurion in both IPL and Syed Mushtaq Ali history.

Sooryavanshi’s numbers across the past five months read like a video-game scorecard: 439 runs in the 2026 U-19 World Cup at 62.71 and a strike rate of 169.49; 1,412 runs in U-19 ODIs at 56.48 with a scoring rate above 165; an IPL deal with Rajasthan Royals worth Rs 1.1 crore; 252 runs in IPL 2025 at a strike rate of 206.55; and a Vijay Hazare blitz of 190 that made him the youngest List A centurion. Yet the immediate challenge is a three-hour paper on a subject he has not faced with a bat in hand.

Teachers say the middle-order phenomenon—who began his ascent with a 58-ball hundred against Australia U-19 in Chennai in October 2024—has been revising between training sessions, often sending voice notes to classmates about quadratic equations while cooling down after net sessions. “There is excitement among everyone, be it teachers, students or parents, for his arrival,” Kishore admitted, “but once the bell rings, he is just another roll number.”

For Indian cricket, the brief hiatus is unusual: a star batter trading power-hitting for periodic tables, a talent pool that rarely pauses voluntarily. For Sooryavanshi, it is a conscious guard against burnout. The aggressive, high-risk template that produced 15 fours and 15 sixes in the Harare final can, on off-days, bring a quick dismissal; the boards offer no second innings either. He will return to the crease next month for age-group Vijay Hazare matches, but first comes the small matter of scoring passing marks rather than strike-rate bragging rights.

As examination centres across Bihar ready their seating plans, the boy who announced himself with a first-ball six in the IPL and finished with a hundred on the biggest youth stage now faces the simplest of instructions: read the question, watch the clock, and, for once, leave the six-hitting to the imagination.